Relational Reasoning and Educational Applications

As the global economy and sociopolitical, technological, climate, and international trade contexts continue to shift rapidly, educational goals and aims for skilled employment are changing accordingly. Research on the cognition of relational reasoning provides insight into training youth to handle these types of complex systems and multi-faceted problems. Relational reasoning is the ability to make inferences from the relationships within and between mental representations, and grounds many higher order cognitive actions such as generating solutions to novel problems, transferring insights from one context to another, and making creative leaps of inference that are central to these societal aims. This article synthesizes the theoretical and foundational literature to highlight specific practices that are relevant and implementable in enhancing all students’ access to rich and complex thinking and reasoning skills. These include strategies for training students to notice and attend to relational correspondences, to use visual stimuli and language to draw connections, and to reduce the cognitive resources required to do so.